TORONTO — A dispute over the use of the term
“gay-straight alliance” in Ontario schools has prompted the Catholic
Archdiocese of Toronto on Monday to accuse Ontario Premier Dalton
McGuinty’s administration of making “religious freedom . . . a
second-class right.”

The church-versus-state showdown was sparked by an amendment from Education Minister Laurel Broten to the anti-bullying bill, closing a loophole that gave schools veto power over club names.

Under
the proposed change, all schools — including those in the Catholic
system — won’t be able to stop students from calling anti-homophobia
clubs “gay-straight alliances.”

Broten said that Ontario’s LGBTQ
students received highlighted mention in the legislation, as
statistically LGBTQ youth are at increased exposure and risk to being
bullied and that schools, parents, and government needs to reinforce the
message that this behavior will not be tolerated.

But in an interview with the Toronto Star,
Marino Gazzola, chairperson of the Ontario Catholic School Trustees’
Association, said Tuesday that using the word “gay” in the name of
supportive clubs is going too far.

I don't care what the weather report says where you are today: it's a beautiful day across Canada.

Tonight,
in over 60 communities big and small, people will be gathering to
celebrate and defend the determined student and people's movement in
Quebec. It's a night of cross-Canada Casseroles, inspired by the
spirited pots and pans protests of the past week in Quebec.

The
world's joining in too, with solidarity Casseroles happening tonight in
London, Paris, Brussels, New York City - and even Little Rock, Arkansas,
believe it or not.

This is a remarkable and nearly totally
spontaneous coming together; the idea of a coordinated 'Casseroles Night
in Canada' was hatched barely 72 hours ago in some late night twitter
banter.

Tonight, in every corner of the country, from Halfmoon Bay
to Halifax, Saltspring Island to Sudbury, Whitehorse to Winnipeg (and
in 50-some other not-necessarily-alliterative towns and cities),
neighbours, friends and perfect strangers will gather to bang some pots
and pans in solidarity with the student strike and in defence of civil
liberties in Quebec.

On his show on MSNBC this Sunday,
Chris Hayes dedicated an hour to the subject of Memorial Day. During the
show, Hayes admitted that labeling all fallen American soldiers as
"heroes" made him uncomfortable.

"It is very difficult to talk
about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without
invoking the word hero. Why do I feel so uncomfortable about the word
hero?" Hayes said. "I feel uncomfortable with the word hero because it
seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for
more war. And I obviously don't want to desecrate or disrespect the
memory of anyone that has fallen. Obviously there are individual
circumstances in which there is tremendous heroism. You know, hail of
gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers, things like that. But it seems to me
that we marshal this word in a way that's problematic, but maybe I'm
wrong about that."

The backlash was as swift and fierce as one would expect.

Breitbart.com'sKurt Schlichter
argues that "the real problem for Chris Hayes is that he actually said
what he thinks. He thinks our soldiers are suckers and fools at best,
brutal sociopaths at worst. At a minimum, he feels that honoring those
who died for this country might encourage people to see that actually
defending our country is a good thing. He's not quite ready to make that
leap; after all, most progressives are ambivalent about this whole
"America" concept, if not actively opposed to it."

This is
obviously silly. American conservatives carry on endlessly about the
value of individualism, but when it comes to praising soldiers on their
individual merits, rather than en masse, it's suddenly
downright anti-American. Chris Hayes is practically spitting on the
troops, according to Schlichter, who does his very best to avoid context
and nuance in favor of ad hominem and vitriol. It's par for the course
with all-things-Breitbart, but does a good enough job illustrating the
cultural divide animating this dispute.

I have traveled extensively in
America's Southwest. I have visited cities like Austin and El Paso,
Texas; Denver and Boulder, Colorado; Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New
Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona. I have walked in the great deserts of
Sonora in Arizona, Mojave in California and Chihuahua in Mexico. In
fact, I live in Southern California, not very far from Los Angeles, a
monster city built in the desert.

When I went to the Joshua Tree
National Park in Southern California, I thought I was on another planet.
Massive boulders, one over the other like pancakes, of great diversity
in size, shape and form, and spread all over the desert landscape, give
the impression that this is a place the gods created only recently, or
that it was made in the beginnings of time but forgotten for countless
millennia. The cacti stand next to these giant stones like witnesses of
an extraordinary story never told. Bushes and exquisite flowers add
luster to this gem of the natural world.

The Southwest is a
beautiful country of blue skies, little water and plenty of land, most
of which is semi-arid, arid or desert. Deserts are by definition
inhospitable to human habitation. These are places reasonable people
abandon quickly. The land is dry, sand-like, harsh and unforgiving. Even
the vegetation and wildlife are sparse, accustomed to little moisture
and nutrients, save for plenty of sunshine and heat.

The Southwest
is not exclusively desert, but it contains an unusually large number of
deserts. Only some of the surviving fragments of Native American
populations live in the deserts. The rest - mostly white - live in the
deserts because they have the illusion that the panoply of their
civilization can defeat the aridity of the land and either mine the
aquifers or bring water from elsewhere. As for the unbearable heat, the
denizens of the deserts bring with them air-conditioned cars and homes,
pretending nature - the hot nature of the deserts - can be domesticated,
perhaps defeated.

Maine Governor Paul LePage (R) vetoed a bill on
Tuesday that would have provided “additional pay to public school
teachers who receive special national certification” and specifically
pointed to the teachers’ union recent endorsement of a referendum to
repeal the state’s ban against same-sex marriage as a reason for his
opposition.

In his veto message, LePage claimed that improving the quality of teachers required “a larger more coordinated statewide solution,”
before lashing out at the teacher’s union, which would partially fund
the certification program. The governor said the union requires teachers
to pay dues “which are squandered on a host of activities not even
remotely related to professional development” and singled out its position on marriage equality:

“The
MEA announced its endorsement recently of the same-sex marriage
proposal on the November ballot,” LePage said in a press release
Tuesday. “This announcement is an example of what the union is choosing to focus on rather than expanding and enhancing opportunities for teacher development.”

LePage had lashed out at the teacher’s union after members unanimously voted
in favor of marriage equality on Sunday. “Too often, however, union
bosses worry about a wide variety of efforts — political campaigns,
lobbying, protecting bad teachers, insurances sales, and providing golf
and skiing discounts — which are not related to furthering the education
of our children,” he claimed, dismissing science which has shown that
legal and social inequalities undermine LGBT families and their children. Research has also shown that schools that discuss gay and lesbian people are safer for LGBT youth than schools that don’t.

The
pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Seneca, Kansas says President
Barack Obama has gone too far in supporting same sex marriage and it’s
time for the U.S. government to begin killing gay men and lesbians.

“Terrorists
are dangerous, the economy is a real and present danger,” Pastor Curtis
Knapp told his congregation on Sunday. “But there is simply nothing
other than the holocaust of the unborn which imperils the safety of our
country or places our people in jeopardy as does the leader of the
Western world publicly raising his fist at the heavens and declaring
that the bedrock institution of society, ordained of God and meant to be
protected by the state, is little more than a convention of convenience
with the children of Sodom to transform the meaning of something, which
is precious to Jesus Christ, and a living picture of his love for the
church into a legally protected justification for perversion and a
vehicle of hatred aimed directly at that love.”

Knapp went on to read from Leviticus 20:
“If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman,
both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put
to death.”

“They should be put to death,” Knapp declared. “‘Oh, so
you’re saying we should go out and start killing them, no?’ — I’m
saying the government should. They won’t, but they should.”

ExxonMobil
shareholders have again voted down a proposal to add gay and
transgender employees to the Irving-based corporation’s
nondiscrimination policy.

Meeting at the Meyerson Symphony Center
in the Dallas Arts District, the ExxonMobil shareholders voted 80
percent to 20 percent Wednesday morning against a resolution asking the
corporation to amend “its written equal employment opportunity policy to
explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and
gender identity and to substantially implement the policy.”

The
proposal has been introduced each year since Mobil and Exxon merged in
1999. The highest level of support came in 2008 at nearly 40 percent.

“It’s
disappointing, but this isn’t the end of the issue for us,” said
Resource Center Dallas’ Rafael McDonnell, who has lobbied the company on
the issue. “We’re going to continue to reach out and engage them. … I
think the White House needs to go back and revisit this executive
order.”

The proposed executive order would require contractors to
include sexual orientation and gender identity in their
nondiscrimination policies if they do business with the federal
government, which Exxon does. However, President Barack Obama’s
administration indicated earlier this year that he doesn’t plan to sign
the proposed order anytime soon.

Written by Annie-Rose Strasser posted from ThinkProgress HealthWednesday, 30 May 2012

A New Orleans women’s health
organization was destroyed last week by an unknown arsonist, becoming
the latest target of attacks on women’s health clinics in the south.

The
organization, Women With A Vision, was likely singled out because it
offers AIDS prevention help, HIV testing, and substance abuse assistance
to sex workers, transgender women, poor women, and women of color. The
clinic also does community outreach and education on those issues. Like twoincidents in Georgia last week, no one was injured in the fire, but the clinic lost a good share of its resources.

The fire burned female and male condoms, HIV education posters, and suits donated for women to wear to job interviews. In a letter on their website, the group discusses the losses, and calls for donations from anyone who can help:

Thanks
to the fast response of all of our supporters across the country, many
of you have already heard that our office was broken into last night and
set on fire. The worst damage was concentrated in our
community organizing and outreach office where we store all of the
resources we use to educate our community. We lost everything. We do not
have an office to operate out of right now. Most of our office
equipment and all of our educational resources were destroyed. Because of the targeted nature, we can only assume that this was intentional.

Labor union vows to advocate on behalf of transgender workers during contract negotiations

05/30/2012

Washington
– Today the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s largest lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization, applauds the
member-delegates of the 2.1 million-member Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) for passing a resolution at their 2012
national conference in Denver yesterday. The resolution states that
SEIU local groups and members will bargain for transgender-inclusive
heath care coverage as part of their contract negotiations with
businesses and employers.

“This is a tremendous step forward in
the fight for workplace equality for LGBT people,” said HRC President
Joe Solmonese. “Our friends at SEIU recognize that all workers should
be treated equitably, and that includes being free from discrimination
on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. We are
incredibly grateful to Mary Kay Henry and the SEIU member-delegates for
continuing to be champions of justice and equality.”

With the
passage of this resolution, SEIU joins the HRC Foundation, who, for the
last decade, has been working to make workplace policies and protections
more inclusive for transgender employees and their families through its
Corporate Equality Index
(CEI). This year the CEI rating criteria was made more stringent,
requiring employers to have transgender inclusive health insurance
coverage. A remarkable 206 companies met the criteria. Furthermore,
HRC's Healthcare Equality Index recommends that all U.S. healthcare facilities provide transgender-inclusive health coverage to their employees.

The
Human Rights Campaign is America’s largest civil rights organization
working to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. By
inspiring and engaging all Americans, HRC strives to end discrimination
against LGBT citizens and realize a nation that achieves fundamental
fairness and equality for all.

In
2008, thousands of Obama campaign volunteers got fired up about
electoral politics in a way they hadn’t been before. Four years later,
some are now running for office themselves. But few have made a bigger
splash in local Democratic circles than former In These Times
staffer Torie Osborn, a nationally-known advocate for gay and lesbian
rights and other progressive causes. Her insurgent campaign for a
California Assembly seat has roiled the waters of Los Angeles-area
liberalism and bucked the legislative leadership in Sacramento, which is
circling the wagons around her main opponent.

If Santa
Monica-based Osborn beats Assemblywoman Betsy Butler in the
newly-created 50th Assembly district—either on June 5 or in a November
general election run-off—her victory over the party establishment will
be a Left Coast monument to what might have been possible, in more
places, if Obama’s campaign organization (or the Democratic Party) had
been serious about grassroots movement building. “There could have been
100, or even 1,000 Torie Osborns, who came out of the network of
energized people trying to change American politics in 2008,” says
California political consultant Paul Kumar, an admirer of Osborn’s
“extraordinary campaign organization.”

Given her strong resume as a
community organizer, non-profit organization leader, and influential
advisor to several Los Angeles mayors, it’s been surprising to some that
Osborn’s well-funded first-time bid for public office wasn’t welcomed
by Assembly Speaker John Pérez and other Democratic legislators. After
helping to launch this magazine as a founding staff member in the
mid-1970s, she played leadership roles in the National Organization for
Women, a pioneering Los Angeles clinic for HIV/AIDS sufferers, and the
national Gay and Lesbian Task Force that mobilized hundreds of thousands
of civil rights marchers in Washington in 1993. While serving as
director of Liberty Hill Foundation, and later with United Way, she
helped channel millions of dollars from well-heeled Hollywooders into
Los Angeles neighborhood projects dealing with gang violence, low-income
housing, and environmental issues. Osborn’s latest work, with
California Calls, has focused on boosting voter registration in the
state and building a coalition to end “loopholes for giant corporate
property owners and the requirement of a two-thirds supermajority vote
by legislators to increase taxes.”

As San Francisco lawyer and Democratic Party activist Paul Hogarth noted in a February 2012 post
on the Bay Area political blog Beyond Chron, California’s
just-completed redistricting process has given “Democrats an historic
opportunity to pick up seats in November— and win a two-thirds majority
that would make Republicans irrelevant.” Instead, Hogarth charged,
“[Speaker] Pérez has diverted resources from competitive ‘swing
districts’ and is instead meddling into Democratic primary fights in
deep-blue seats” so he can “consolidate control at the expense of
everything else.” The chances of the Democrats gaining the necessary two
additional seats in both houses of the legislature has decreased, as a
result.

Official support for marketising nature to stop its destruction means the practical action at Rio+20 will be at People's summit

Hannah GriffithsTuesday 29 May 2012

The 1992 Rio Earth summit established "sustainable development"
firmly in the global political lexicon – even though the term meant,
and continues to mean, different things to different people. For Stephan
Schmidheiny, a CEO who was appointed chief adviser for business and
industry at the summit and subsequently set up the World Business
Council on Sustainable Development, it apparently means continuing with
business as usual: in February, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison for the deaths of thousands of workers at his asbestos-cement factory.

As the Rio+20 anniversary conference approaches, a battle rages over the definition of another term: "green economy". "A green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication" is a key conference theme. It sounds good, but what does it mean?

According to one of the official preparatory documents
(pdf): "Several delegations proposed the valuing of ecosystem services
and internalising of environmental externalities as key elements of a
green economy, as well as green accounting (pdf); while some delegations cautioned against further marketisation of nature's services."

The
jargon masks some diametrically opposing views. On one side, many
northern governments are saying we trash the natural world because we
don't value it properly. So far, so good. But they go on to confuse
"value" with "price", which is where it all starts to break down. They
argue that to conserve or protect the resources and functions we need
from nature, we need to ascribe a financial value to them and bring them
into the market. Then we will pay the proper price for nature and stop
destroying it.

At the end of the 1990s, after the
total collapse of the mass-privatization experiment in Boris Yeltin's
Russia, some of the more earnest free-market proselytizers tried making
sense of it all. The unprecedented collapse of Russia's economy and its
capital markets, the wholesale looting, the quiet extermination of
millions of Russians from the shock and destitution (Russian male life
expectancy plummeted from 68 years to 56 years)—the terrible
consequences of imposing radical libertarian free-market ideas on an
alien culture—turned out worse than any worst-case-scenario imagined by
the free-market true-believers.

Of all the disastrous results of
that experiment, what troubled many Western free-market true-believers
most wasn't so much the mass poverty and population collapse, but
rather, the way things turned out so badly in Russia's newly-privatized
companies and industries. That was the one thing that was supposed to go
right. According to the operative theory—developed by the founding
fathers of libertarianism/neoliberalism, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von
Mises, Milton Friedman and the rest—a privately-owned company will
always outperform a state-run company because private ownership and the
profit-motive incentivize the owners to make their companies stronger,
more efficient, more competitive, and so on. The theory promises that
everyone benefits except for the bad old state and the lazy.

That
was the dominant libertarian theory framing the whole "shock doctrine"
privatization experiment in Russia and elsewhere. In reality, as
everyone was forced to admit by 1999, Russia's privatized companies were
stripped and plundered as fast as their new private owners could loot
them, leaving millions of workers without salaries, and most of Russia's
industry in far worse shape than the Communists left it.

But
some of the more earnest believers whose libertarian faith was shaken
by what happened to Corporate Russia needed something more sophisticated
than a crude historical whitewash.

Lucky for them, Milton
Friedman provided the answer to a Cato Institute interviewer: Russia
lacked "rule of law"—another neoliberal/libertarian catchphrase that
went mainstream in the late 80s. Without "rule of law,"
Friedman and the rest of the free-market faithful argued, privatization
was bound to fail. Here's Friedman's answer in the Cato Institute's 2002 Economic Freedom of the World Report:

Conservatives
must be feeling regretful. After nearly fifty years of using appeals to
white racial resentment to take over the South, win presidential
elections and control of Congress, conservatives are realizing this
might come back to bite them in the ass. As the right wing has become
xenophobic and anti-Latino, conservatives have watched young Latinos and
young Asian Americans join young African-Americans in being
overwhelmingly Democratic. The greater diversity of this younger
generation has in turn meant that Democrats, especially Barack Obama,
have won handily among young voters in recent elections. All of a
sudden, conservatives see being the party of angry white males as a
potential liability, and they want to change their image.

You can
see this concern in Mitt Romney’s recent campaign events touting his
substantively thin but rhetorically compassionate education reform
agenda. As the Washington Postreported on
Romney’s visit to a school in West Philadelphia on Thursday, his first
campaign event in a majority black neighborhood: “Mitt Romney’s campaign
team has been quietly laying plans for an outreach effort to President
Obama’s most loyal supporters—black voters—not just to chip away at the
huge Democratic margins but also as a way to reassure independent swing
voters that Romney can be inclusive and tolerant in his thinking and
approach.” Romney’s campaign insists they are sincere, but they never
made any such outreach during the primaries, when they were competing
against Newt Gingrich’s successful efforts to appeal to racism in his campaign in South Carolina.

The
conservative media are happy to help burnish both white racial
anxieties and the official story line that Republicans are the friends
of minorities by trying to tell an oddly inverted story of race
relations in America. According to National Review’s current
cover story by Kevin Williamson, it is the Republican Party which has
consistently supported civil rights and Democrats who have opposed it.
Meanwhile, conservative blogs, talk radio and Fox News hype random
stories of anti-white violence, creating the false impression that
whites are more often the victims of hate crimes by blacks than the
reverse.

The National Review argument has been thoroughly debunked in many outlets. Over at Democracy Journal, Clay Risen demonstrates
“Williamson’s embarrassingly basic misunderstanding of American
history.” There used to be liberal pro–civil rights wings and
conservative anti–civil rights wings in both parties, hence the
misleading factoid commonly cited by conservative pundits that a higher
proportion of Republicans than Democrats in Congress voted for the Civil
Rights Act of 1964. But it was the liberal wing of the Democratic
Party, especially Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who pushed the issue
and got the law passed.

Republicans nominated anti–civil rights
conservative extremist Barry Goldwater in 1964 and thus began their
conversion of the South. Goldwater carried five Southern states despite
losing in a landslide. “For a variety of reasons—including, but not
only, racial politics—both parties went through ideological realignments
in the postwar decades, so that today we speak of Republicans as almost
uniformly conservative and Democrats as almost uniformly liberal,”
notes Risen. “The GOP of today is simply not the GOP of 1963.” That’s
why anti–civil rights Southern conservatives such as Trent Lott, Strom
Thurmond and Jesse Helms became Republicans. Williamson is simply lying
when he writes,
“those southerners who defected from the Democratic Party in the 1960s
and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more
enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era.”

A
Christian psychotherapist lost her appeal last week against a ruling by
the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy that her
behaviour in offering to therapeutically change a patient’s sexuality
was negligent.

A decision given last week confirmed that Lesley
Pilkington had been described by the BACP as “negligent”, “dogmatic” and
“unprofessional” in her behaviour after she was approached by
undercover journalist Patrick Strudwick.

Although
it did not address gay conversion therapy directly, the appeals panel
said the counsellor’s behaviour amounted to “professional malpractice in
that Mrs Pilkington had failed to provide the complainant with adequate
professional services that could reasonably be expected of a
practitioner exercising reasonable skill and care.”

The BACP appeals panel
said it was “of the opinion that, given that the complainant presented
with depression and unhappiness, it is incumbent upon a practitioner to
explore why he was depressed/unhappy and not to take at face value his
assertion that it is because of an unwanted same sex attraction. Not to
do this and to rush in and assume that the complainant’s depression and
unhappiness must follow from his unwanted same sex attraction was below
the standard expected of a reasonably competent practitioner.”

Stephen
Evans, Campaigns Manager at the National Secular Society said Ms
Pilkington was “guilty of religiously inspired bigotry parading as
psychotherapy.”

“Louisiana
is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people,
per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means
first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple
Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.”

That paragraph opens a devastating eight-part series
published this month by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans about how the
state’s largely private prison system profits from high incarceration
rates and tough sentencing, and how many with the power to curtail the
system actually have a financial incentive to perpetuate it.

The picture that emerges is one of convicts as chattel and a legal system essentially based on human commodification.

First, some facts from the series:

• One in 86 Louisiana adults is in the prison system, which is nearly double the national average.

•
More than 50 percent of Louisiana’s inmates are in local prisons, which
is more than any other state. The next highest state is Kentucky at 33
percent. The national average is 5 percent.

• Louisiana leads the nation in the percentage of its prisoners serving life without parole.

It’s a common sight across the country: A family packs up its belongings and moves to a new state it will call home.

Sometimes
it’s a job opportunity that calls. Other times it’s family. These moves
are life-changing events for any family, but for LGBT people, the
simple act of crossing a state line has even more significance.

It can mean your marriage no longer exists in the eyes of that state.

It can mean the law won’t protect you from discrimination.

It can mean you have fewer parental rights.

This
is the reality the LGBT community faces every day thanks to the
patchwork of state laws regarding LGBT rights in this country. It’s a
reality that exists even after President Obama announced his support for
same-sex marriage – a position he said “evolved” from his earlier
support of civil unions.

While Obama’s recent announcement is
certainly a historic milestone for LGBT rights, he made some troubling
remarks that show he must continue to “evolve” on this issue. Otherwise,
the LGBT community will continue to see its fundamental rights ebb and
flow from state to state.

Sadly, the president says he believes
each state should decide the issue of same-sex marriage, saying this
approach is a “healthy process” that spurs “healthy debate.” Even more
troubling, he framed his support for same-sex marriage as a personal
position rather than a civil rights issue.

His position denies the
fact that LGBT rights are civil rights. They should not be subject for
debate – even a “healthy debate.” And they should not be subject to the
whim of the majority by placing them on the ballot.
It’s ludicrous
to believe the gains of the civil rights movement would have been
achieved by putting the civil rights of black people on the ballot
across the Deep South. And today, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, we
see how this wrongheaded approach is denying the LGBT community its
rights.

Our client Chelsea Hughes watched her parental rights
evaporate after the father of her children moved to Alabama. He used the
state’s ban on same-sex marriage to deny her right to overnight
visitation with her children, solely because she lives with her partner
Jaymi. Even though Chelsea and Jaymi are registered domestic partners in
Washington state, under Alabama law, Jaymi is considered a “paramour,"
as if their committed relationship were no more than a casual fling. The
result is that Chelsea has been unable to tuck her four young children
into bed for over a year now, while the SPLC continues to fight for her
parenting rights.

Chelsea, and countless others like her across
the South and elsewhere, cannot wait for their home states to "evolve."
That six states and the District of Columbia have affirmed the right of
gay and lesbian couples to marry provides little consolation. For every
state that has made advances for the LGBT community, there’s a state
where lawmakers exploit the backlash to these gains to pass laws
restricting LGBT rights. Just last month, we saw North Carolina inscribe
discrimination into their constitution by banning same-sex marriages
and civil unions.

Here in Alabama, there is little likelihood that
state legislators or the courts will advance laws protecting the LGBT
community, much less pass legislation supporting same-sex marriage. This
is where Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore in 2002 wrote an
opinion in a child custody case that said homosexuality was “abhorrent,
immoral, detestable, a crime against nature and a violation of the laws
of nature and of nature's God.” He also wrote that gay parents were
“presumptively unfit to have custody of minor children under the
established laws of this state.”

In Alabama classrooms, teachers
leading sex education classes where the instruction extends beyond
abstinence education are required by law to teach “in a factual manner
and from a public health perspective, that homosexuality is not a
lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct
is a criminal offense under the laws of the state.”

It’s clear.
The tide is not going to turn anytime soon in Alabama or its neighbor
states. This means LGBT families will continue to suffer undue hardship
because they are not seen as equal in the eyes of the state. Yet, in the
same nation, a completely different experience may be found in another
state that recognizes LGBT rights.

This patchwork approach is not
sustainable. Allowing each individual state to maybe someday come around
to recognizing fundamental rights just won’t work, and will only harm
our country. These are universal rights. We cannot be a nation that
espouses equality for all when so many in the LGBT community, like
Chelsea and Jaymi, are forced to check their rights at the door.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Nothing like deprivation to muddy up your understanding of “want” vs. “need.”

For
instance, here’s a sampling of items I’ve considered “needs” over the
past two weeks: new sports bras, shower curtain, new couch pillows,
lime-squeezer kitchen gadget, iPad case, duchess satin bridesmaid dress,
cat scratching post, and a handmade silver ring shaped like a poppy.
This is doubly remarkable, as I’m not really the shopping type. But I’m
also in the middle of a self-imposed No New Stuff May, and we all know
what happens when you start branding the fruit forbidden.

My No
New Stuff month is a challenge not to buy anything brand-new for the 31
days of May (food and certain toiletries obviously excepted, you
sickos). Why? I already have everything I need to stay hale and hearty,
and my small apartment wouldn’t fit much more stuff, anyway. But really,
it’s a small stand against a “Bigger, Better, More!” culture that
tosses perfectly good items into landfills and gobbles up new resources
to build still more stuff — much of which we don’t even need.

That’s
not to say I’m going native, eschewing capitalism, and weaving a new
wardrobe out of grass clippings. Under my challenge, buying used stuff
from resale shops or Craigslist is street legal, as is repairing broken
items and just plain doing without. I began without any pressing needs
on the shopping front, curious to discover what desires might pop up as
the month went on and how well I’d be able to satisfy them. And just as I
used to hide forbidden copies of Sweet Valley Highbooks under my bed as a kid, now that new purchases are taboo I’ve been deluged with strange wants masquerading as needs.

World Health Organisation estimates 10,000 black market operations involving human organs take place each year

The
illegal trade in kidneys has risen to such a level that an estimated
10,000 black market operations involving purchased human organs now take
place annually, or more than one an hour, World Health Organisation experts have revealed.

Evidence
collected by a worldwide network of doctors shows that traffickers are
defying laws intended to curtail their activities and are cashing in on
rising international demand for replacement kidneys driven by the
increase in diabetes and other diseases.

Patients, many of whom will go to China, India or Pakistan
for surgery, can pay up to $200,000 (nearly £128,000) for a kidney to
gangs who harvest organs from vulnerable, desperate people, sometimes
for as little as $5,000.

The vast sums to be made by both
traffickers and surgeons have been underlined by the arrest by Israeli
police last week of 10 people, including a doctor, suspected of
belonging to an international organ trafficking ring and of committing
extortion, tax fraud and grievous bodily harm. Other illicit organ
trafficking rings have been uncovered in India and Pakistan.

The
Guardian contacted an organ broker in China who advertised his services
under the slogan, "Donate a kidney, buy the new iPad!" He offered £2,500
for a kidney and said the operation could be performed within 10 days.

We can best honor those who have
given their lives for this nation in combat by making sure our military
might is proportional to what America needs.

The United States spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany put together.

With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the cost of fighting
wars is projected to drop – but the “base” defense budget (the annual
cost of paying troops and buying planes, ships, and tanks – not
including the costs of actually fighting wars) is scheduled to rise. The
base budget is already about 25 percent higher than it was a decade
ago, adjusted for inflation.

One big reason: It’s almost
impossible to terminate large defense contracts. Defense contractors
have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and
facilities in politically important congressional districts. Lockheed
Martin, Raytheon, and others have made spending on national defense into
America’s biggest jobs program.

So we keep spending billions
on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft
carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of
defense contractors but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat.

For example, the Pentagon says it wants to buy fewer F-35 joint strike
fighter planes than had been planned – the single-engine fighter has
been plagued by cost overruns and technical glitches – but the
contractors and their friends on Capitol Hill promise a fight.

Over the last few weeks, Bryan Fischer has been growing increasingly vocal about his views that President Obama hates both the Constitution and the United States of America because he thinks it is "one big, giant Ku Klux Klan meeting" and is therefore intentionally trying to destroy the country.

EDITORS
and pundits seem to agree that the 2012 presidential election will be
one of the hardest fought in memory. Even the international press has
jumped in; an Economist cover predicts “Hardball,” and in April The
Guardian called the campaign “ruthless in its backstabbing,” warning,
“you have seen nothing yet.”

What should be explained instead is
how civil our recent contests have been, for as a society America has
always been attracted to ruthlessness. It might be defined not just as
hard competition but as the deployment of unfair, unethical and
distasteful (if often technically legal) methods. American culture
blended a Protestant sense of mission and virtue with a pragmatism that
could countenance slavery and Indian removal.

America hardly
invented ruthlessness — think of that all-American hero, Napoleon
Bonaparte — but it extended it to the common people. Moralists from
Benjamin Franklin to Horatio Alger and beyond might celebrate character
as the path to success, but the man in the street knew differently.
Adventurers like the notorious filibusterer William Walker
became folk heroes. After a New Orleans jury acquitted Walker of
violating the Neutrality Act of 1818, he began a fund-raising tour for a
new adventure. The early 20th century rags-to-riches baseball star Ty
Cobb “came in hard and with spikes high,” as his biographer Charles C.
Alexander put it, and kept alive the false rumor that he sharpened them.

Secession
sought to protect not just the plantation owners’ way of life but also
the aspirations of Southern yeomen to slaveowning wealth, following the
career of the populist military hero and president Andrew Jackson. And
after the war, the robber barons were as much admired as condemned for
their tactics. As the muckraking historian Matthew Josephson wrote
during the Depression in his book “The Robber Barons,” objections to the
ethics of post-Civil War entrepreneurs like Jim Fisk and Jay Gould were countered by the observation that they were “smart men.”

Americans
had mixed feelings about their 20th-century technological and financial
heroes, too. Thomas A. Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company hired
thugs to enforce his patent claims; independent filmmakers moved to
Hollywood partly to avoid them. Steve Jobs paid little attention to
conditions in his Chinese contractors’ factories. After his death
protests grew too large for Apple to ignore; but even then, not only was
“bad Steve” praised, but many of the demonstrators in the early Occupy
Wall Street movement still revered him.

Attacks on the ruthless
may actually increase their allure. In the 1930s, The New Yorker
reported that a young man applying for a brokerage job declared that he
had read “The Robber Barons” and wanted to become one of them. Fifty
years later, the Oliver Stone film “Wall Street,” intended as an exposé
of greed, inspired a generation of fans of the fictional Gordon Gekko,
as portrayed by Michael Douglas. Perhaps it was this dark glamour that
helped persuade President Bill Clinton, supported by his deputy attorney
general (and current attorney general), Eric H. Holder Jr., to pardon a
refugee from justice, Marc Rich.

How the gay movement's successes surpassed feminism and civil rights -- and became a model for a new era

At
the height of the real estate boom in the 2000s, Robert M. “Robby”
Browne, 2007 Corcoran Real Estate National Sales Person of the Year, put
on his woman’s bathing suit and silver heels and walked out onto the
Club Exit stage. A thousand screaming, cheering, photo-snapping real
estate brokers roared their approval. The openly gay Browne, six feet
tall and nearly two hundred pounds, danced a sweetly amateurish version
of the Village People’s gay anthem, “YMCA,” as ten half naked male
Broadway dancers backed him up.

“Is there any question of who the
star is?” Browne asks proudly, watching the video today. For most real
estate brokers, a third year as Corcoran’s top producer would have been
stardom enough, but when Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman began planning the
2007 event, Browne thought he wouldn’t bother to attend. He’d had enough
top-earner, $100-million-club years. He was turning sixty, and he was
thinking about his life as a whole. Finally he said he would show up,
but only if he could accept the award in drag. Browne’s beloved gay
older brother, Roscoe Willett Browne, died of AIDS in 1985. He’d never
forget the day when President George H. W. Bush said that dying of AIDS
wasn’t as important as losing your job. “George H. W. Bush did not
acknowledge the sacrifice of my brother and our love. My brother. He’s
in his eighties and he still has his brothers and I don’t have any
brothers,” says Browne. “And my brother was a Yalie and he was in
Vietnam; Bush, how could he be more your person?” We exist, says Browne,
looking at the video of his awards ceremony. “This show says we exist.”

Exist?
You can’t pick up a paper without seeing evidence that gay people exist
and are compelling American society to acknowledge them. The federal
government protects them from homophobic violence and twenty-one states
have laws against discrimination; 141 cities across the country
constitute enclaves of equal treatment. A federal nondiscrimination bill
gains more support in Congress with each passing year. Poll numbers
show Americans overwhelmingly support protection for gays and lesbians
against hate crimes and equality in health benefits, housing, and jobs.
In July 2010, a federal judge struck down the federal law, the Defense
of Marriage Act, that excluded gays from the federal benefits for which
married people were eligible and that allowed the states to refuse to
recognize the marriages if they pleased. In August, another federal
judge invalidated the amendment to the California constitution, added by
Proposition 8, that limited marriage to a man and a woman. September
had hardly dawned when a third federal judge found the policy requiring
gay soldiers to hide their sexual orientation, don’t ask/don’t tell,
unconstitutional as well. The United States Congress repealed the law
prohibiting out gays and lesbians from serving in the armed forces.
Right after the Fourth of July in 2011, the federal courts in California
ordered the United States military to stop screwing around getting
ready and just cease enforcing it at once.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson